“Preserving the value of the business in the face of disruption”

Businesses are exposed to a huge variety of risk on a daily basis. To keep their competitive edge companies must understand and mitigate risks facing their organisation. Some of the more obvious threats are obvious to management and can be managed or negated through tools or utilities, before the potential threat has impacted heavily on the business. A lot of other risks lie undetected until the company is fully exposed and recovery options have to be instigated. To survive in a crisis companies must ensure that the right planning, safeguarding and support is readily available allowing them to continue to deliver their business services.

Unplanned events can have a devastating effect on businesses. Depending on your business there are many possible events that could greatly disrupt or even threaten the survival of your business, these could include:

With good planning steps can be taken to mitigate and manage the potential impact of disaster and ideally preventing it from happening in the first place

What is Business Continuity Management?

Business Continuity Management helps manage these risks to smooth the running of an organisation, or delivery of a service, ensuring continuity of critical functions in the event of disruption, and effective recovery afterwards. An effective B.C.M plan should be created to ensure that:

• key business applications and data are protected and available
• process management and documentation
• minimise the interruption to business functions for your clients and business partners
• reduce the probability of an incident occurring
• facilitate a continued level of critical business service
• improve recovery timescales
• link your third party projects to your recovery operations or supply chain
• build business confidence with stakeholders

Many people associate Business Continuity and emergency planning with such threats as terrorism. However a fire, flood or catastrophic I.T failure may be as damaging as the consequences of an act of terrorism. Therefore a B.C.M Plan should be produced to cover all risks.

A poll taken in October 2008 shows that less than 30 percent of workers thought their employer could survive a continued disruption for over six months with nearly 20 percent fearing their employer would be out of business within one month. With the right BCM planning employers and their employees would be able to work in the comfort that they are prepared for these eventualities